


particles

by mara_jaded



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 19:01:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13394220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mara_jaded/pseuds/mara_jaded
Summary: a collection of andrei-centric drabbles from my tumblr @mythologylesbian





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by @maybe-queen-of-numenor on tumblr

i.  
you live your life as if you've already lost your life, your chest aching like the wound in your side that never really healed. you keep your heart wrapped in chains and if anything happens to seep out, you turn the other way. you imagine yourself at nineteen, as if in knowing yourself, you could ever know her. you were nineteen and every day with lise flashed and sparked like fireworks or cannonballs. you were twenty-one and you forgot how to love in the time you were away from her. perhaps she, too, forgot how to love you, and all she needed was not to be alone.

ii.  
the night you knew you loved her: she flickers through your memory like a candle, spinning in white silk and sparkling jewels before coming to rest in your arms. you remember her shining costume and radiant smile, bright and innocent as the dawn, as if she was the only prick of light in the blackness of the russian winter night; your rough, broad hands out of place against her smooth arm, her slender waist, her delicate fingers threaded through yours, her gaze enraptured.

iii.  
the night you knew you loved her was not the night you met her. she threw open her window, not seeming to feel the chill through her thin nightdress, and sang in exuberance at the moonlight. you thought merely that you had fallen in love with the night, the moon, her crystalline voice piercing the still air. and your bitter heart began to stir and you raised your bitter head and listened. and feelings you could not explain stole through the stagnant blood of your tired body and you could not sleep for thinking of her. and still, you did not know you loved her until you held her in your arms.

iv.  
the night you know you love her still comes far, far too late. sightless, you trace the seams of your tent, the cold ground, his soft breathing. you pretend it's hers, and your too-rough fingertips twitch toward the warm body too close and too far from you. but it's only pierre, and she is so far from you. and once you had all of her, her body in your arms and her heart in your hand. and now you have none of her. does she love you still? do her thoughts even linger on you, broken on a barren field and about to break in battle?

v.  
you drag yourself across the beaten earth like a homecoming, and sometimes you swear that she's there before you, on the horizon, just out of reach, but she flickers in and out as you close your eyes. still, you reach for her with every torn muscle and shattered bone and she still courses through the blood that pounds in your ears. and love fills you up with every inch you bear yourself across.

vi.  
when they lay you out on the filthy table, love is all you know. love beyond the pain in your body, love beyond the petrification of your heart, and you wish that you could still live so that you could live in the light of the love that you have discovered. and you weep for her, not because she is lost, but because you are found; not in sorrow but in the intensity of this new feeling that sweeps through you. and you see him, and you weep for him, him a dumb and beautiful boy, and you an old man like your father. and you forgive him, and you grasp his hand like a lifeline, like he alone holds you to the world blurring and fading to red and black behind your paper eyelids. and you love, and you love, and you love.

vii.  
she comes to you and you swear that you're dreaming. she is good and you are bad and you do not deserve her now, drifting to your bedside. she wears white like the night you knew you loved her, and your lips form the shape of this newfound word but nothing comes out. she doesn't speak either, but holds your hand until the candle on the table is replaced by thin tongues of the sun springing over the horizon. and she holds your hand and dresses your wound and you replace your remorse with the epiphany of this love.

viii.  
and ultimately, you die, as if you’ve lived a thousand lifetimes and haven’t just stepped into the newborn light for the very first time; but the grief that surrounds you cannot pierce the armor of your love. on the precipice of twilight, you are masha. you feel her aching, gnawing sorrow as if it were your own, the quiet resilience of her faith that becomes yours through the hands you hold. you are natasha, her desperate guilt and burning penance. the love she never let go of.

ix.  
and ultimately, you die; you die in love.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: andrei "it wasn't your fault"

after he dies, andrei begins to understand. it is through sharp and agonizing hellfire that he begins to understand. the spinning of the earth, the spinning of the cannonball--

no, andrei isn't dead, not this time, not ever, not again. 

he remembers the futility with which he stood, his death rotating and hissing at his feet; and still he stood there, watching, knowing the meaning of the deceptively simple shell, his feet anchored to the battle-bare earth. and still he stood there, and he did not want to move. the spinning of the earth, the spinning of the cannonball--

andrei loves the cannonball before him. the deceptively simple shell spiraling across the battle-bare earth, his feet weighted into the struggling blades of grass--

it does not matter from whom the cannonball is thrown, and there is no reason for it to have been thrown, but it was thrown anyway, by someone--a boy, almost, his soft french face dripping sweat as he fires a cannon he has no reason to fire, but that he fires anyway, because someone told him to fire the cannon, someone told him that the russians need to die and so he kills them without thought for any life but his own.

the boy is like anatole kuragin; a beautiful child, a brat, a fool. the boy is like anatole; simple and earnest and swept along in the general tide of war. the boy kills russians because the whole french army kills russians, and the boy never wonders why. the boy never wonders why because the boy never feels as if what he is doing is wrong. the boy believes russians must die. the boy believes he decided on his own that russians must die. the boy is wrong. his army coat stretches across the boy's broad shoulders and the boy has never considered buying a new coat.

anatole kuragin is anatole kuragin because society tells him he must be anatole kuragin and anatole kuragin has never, ever felt as if what he is doing is wrong. anatole kuragin believes he must love natasha rostova. anatole kuragin believes he has fallen in love with natasha rostova by the volition of his heart. anatole kuragin is wrong. anatole kuragin is more than a name; anatole kuragin is a persona that fits tolya like a second skin, but anatole kuragin is not tolya, and tolya never realizes that he is not anatole kuragin.

andrei realizes. in the slender dusk of life he still has left to live, andrei realizes. between firebrand stabs of pain radiating through his body, andrei awakes as if from sleep. through his newly discovered love, andrei learns to see beyond the mortal veil that makes us believe that we are who we are, and andrei knows--

there is nothing the boy next to him has done that andrei cannot forgive with his divine love. the boy is choking on his own anguished sobs. "who am i?" he despairs, his voice barely intelligible through his tears and the mad fear in his clear blue eyes. and he is right--in this operating tent, tolya is no longer the anatole kuragin that is the only thing he knows how to be. his halo of blonde curls is darkened and concealed by the blood that soaks it, his too-beautiful face made revolting by its spattering of mud and gore and its contortion with the convulsive sobs that wrack what little is left of his body.

when sobs subside and turn to silent tears coursing down his cheeks, cutting a riverbed through the filth on his face, anatole turns his head and sees andrei lying next to him, equally wounded and equally vulnerable. "i'm sorry," anatole whispers. it is all he can manage through his despair and the lump in his throat.

and andrei, in his love, reaches out a hand, entwines his fingers with anatole's, both hands slippery with blood but both men refusing to let the other go. and andrei, in the clarity his love provides, though his voice is broken as his body, replies. "there is nothing to forgive. it wasn't your fault."


	3. Chapter 3

the firelight carves shadows in andrei's face, chiselling deeper into the impermeable stone of his expression; emphasizing hollows that had not always been there, pierre notices. that was always andrei's style - in his despondency, he ceases to care for himself; he doesn't eat enough, sleep enough, be gentle. his jaw is clenched like his hands, perhaps unconsciously, as his mind spirals into dimensions unknown to pierre, but knowable.

 

"my god," he utters, suddenly. "what is the sense in this?" pierre's gaze fixes on him, but silently. "the brutality. and for what honor? what dignity? my god. could we not have stopped this? could you?"

 

"how could i," pierre replies. "i may be a mason, but i am just one man."

 

"one man, one man," andrei says, rising and beginning to pace. "my god, but we are all men. and some of us will die, and some of us will live, and what is the difference? what is the difference between another man and i? how does god favor the one who lives more than the one who dies? oh, pierre - how can i live like this? i can't, i can't." his expression darkens as he moves from the fire, his burning eyes the only light in his face. "at least it won't be for long."

 

and without being told, pierre knows that tomorrow, his friend will march across the battlefield like a common soldier, will trade sparks and cannonfire alongside the infantry he now equates himself to. his luminary contrail spiraling earthward, despair wrenching his excellence from the sky -

 

he takes his hand. "you're thinking of her."

 

"i told you - " he squeezes his eyes shut, counting on the gathering darkness to hide the action. "not to _speak_ to me of that."

 

"andrei," pierre insists, dropping his hand but taking the step forward so that they are almost touching. though they are out of the glow of the fire, they are close enough that pierre can make out barely-glistening tears at the corners of his friend's eye. "i know how much you love her, i know how much it hurts. by god, i know."

 

"you cannot," andrei bites out, but pierre persists.

 

"more than i can tell you, i know."

 

"you - "

 

"how could i not, andrei?"

 

"why did you never say anything? you told me she loved me, you told me to marry her, for god's sake. how long?"

 

pierre feels matching tears begin to form in his own eyes. "as long as i've known her," he confesses. "but andrei, i could never speak a word to take away from her happiness. either of yours - "

 

the hand that touches pierre's cheek is firm, but hesitant, a question burning whose answer is sought like a lifeline, a question having been asked for innumerable years, since two boys' eyes met across a paris soiree, before the name _napoleon_ had ever been heard in russia, or natasha rostova had spoken her first word. a question as old as the world itself, or so it seems, as the world has been reduced just to _andrei_ , _andrei_ ; his despised tears and not-quite-shaking hands and tremulous breath that somehow now is close enough to be hot on pierre's neck. a chill ghosts through pierre and his hands clutch the other man's lapels, seemingly of their own accord. pierre knows the silk of the epaulet tassels that brush against his knuckles and the rustle of the tent flap and they push their way through and nothing else but _andrei, andrei, andrei._


End file.
